Saba Saba at Thirty-five

I was a boy when Kamukunji became a battleground between the restore-multiparty zealots and Baba Moi. And a boy, I filtered the political questions of the day through the lens of my parents' anxieties. It is thirty-five years since "the opposition" forced Moi to decree that Section 2A of the former constitution would be repealed and Kenya would be restored to multi-party politics.

The more things change, the more thee stay the same.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr  (1849).

History is a funny thing. The longer you live, the more you forget, the more you must be reminded by those who are younger than you. The Seven Bearded Sisters initiated a sequence of political events that culminated in the restoration of multiparty democracy. They could not have predicted how wildly the pendulum would swing against the principles they held or, even more wildly, how many of the pro-democracy campaigners would betray those principles or how.

Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel Moi and Mwai Kibakli oversaw a security apparatus that murdered pro-democracy campaigners with impunity. Extra-judicial executions of Kenyans fighting for a more democratic political environment defines some of the darkest moments of the Kenya political project. In 2025, the political environment is redolent of the accusations of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. In many cases, the same faces feature. Where once they were bit players in a larger political narrative, today, they are star players.

What has not changed is that the pro-democracy campaigners are young, educated and highly motivated. They will not win, though, unless they learn the lessons of the 1990s and 2000s. They must eschew the narrative that revolutionary change ends with the toppling of an existing order. They must accept that the project they are engaged in is a multi-generational one, one that will require the highest level of dedication and sacrifice for the longest period and that it shall need to be handed off to successive generations who, even in the most optimistic scenarios, may not enjoy the fruits of.

One of the defining features of the 1990s was the fracturing of "the opposition" and the co-option by Moi's KANU of opposition stalwarts. Many "ate ugali" in State House. They never lived down the accusations of betrayal and died as pariahs. Many "crossed the floor" of the National Assembly and entered into "coalitions" with the ruling party. What they got in return was lucrative public tenders that were never closely scrutinised by the Controller and Auditor-General - or Parliament.

I was in India when the Congress government of Inder Kumar Gujral fell. I was still there when the BJP government of Atal Behari Vajpayee succumbed to the anti-Muslim Hindu supremacism of the RSS and Sangh Parivar culminating in the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom. The six years between the two events demonstrated to me the value of a coherent ideological consistency for a political party. The relatively swift destruction of the Congress's socialism between the election of Haradanahalli Doddegowda Deve Gowda and the resignation of IK Gujral was mirrored by the ascension of AB Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. In the former, the party stopped believing in its own ideology; in the latter, the party solidified its ideology, purged the party of Doubting Thomases, and cemented its own rule for the next two decades, culminating inn the ascension of the Hindu purist, Narendra Modi.

Kenya's Gen Z, violently effective as they may be, do not have a coherent political ideology. They will never take political power so long as this remains true. They are a mirror to the ideological nakedness of the Second Liberation Movement: it was only invested in the restoration of multiparty democracy, and no more. Saba Saba 1990 forced Moi to recalibrate his politics; it did not establish an alternative political philosophy and therefore, it was easy to fracture the opposition.

We are in 2025. The names in the parliamentary Hansard are almost all new. The same narrative is being told, though. Laws that make no sense. Constitutional amendments that cement politicians' power but offer nothing for the electorate. "Activists" demanding "change" but whose members are only held together by vague promises of "full implementation of the constitution" and not much else. The Gen Z may have developed into a political force; but they have no political identity or ideology. (These contradictions befuddle me, I promise.) Thirty-five years after Saba Saba, the shedding of blood is the same; the lack of ideology is the same; will the political outcome be the same?

What goes around, comes around

Toadies are an exhausting lot. There is one in the senate, and I won't say for whom he toadies, who's fat smug face arouses a deep and baleful rage that it is a wonder he has not been smothered in his bed by the woman he shares it with. There is another one in the National Assembly who speaks with cut-glass kizungu who does so much to remind the people why they hate her and hate her with a passion that it boggles the mind that her not-so-great wealth and power has so far managed to insulate her from the national bile she inspires.

These sorts of people can be found in all sorts of places. They all have the same qualities, though: they are just decently smart enough to be noticed but not so smart as to make anything meaningful of themselves. They are very good at sussing out the direction of the wind, even if the wind happens to be their patrons farting in their face. And because their noses are so finely tuned to wind-direction, they know when to lay supine for the boss's belly rub and when to push whoever happens to be in the vicinity into the path of their boss's inevitable rageful flip-out. And their bosses ragefully flip out a great many times.

They are excellent snitches and, in this day and social media age, expert snitch-taggers. The more successfully they toady, the more they are rewarded, and they usually turn these rewards into armies of 578/= snitch-tagging bloggers who do nothing but parrot the praise-singing of the toadies. They are also well acquainted with the use-and-dump philosophy; so long as it is in their masters' interest, they will use you, abuse you, and dump you faster than they dispose of the prophylactics they use during their more careful assignations. Yet, they forget, they too, are equally disposable.

This is, in fact, their defining characteristic. They assume airs and turn their noses up at the rest of us, believing that the boss would never turn on them. They step on toes and bury knives in so many rivals' backs, it is a wonder that don't notice the blood trails they leave behind wherever they go. This blindspot stays firmly in place until the day they are replaced by brand new toadies. When their usefulness ends, because they no longer pay attention to the task at hand, their fall from grace is so abrupt and so violent, many never recover.

A former chief justice cuts a pitiable sight these days. When he was at the height of his powers, members of the Bar and Bench feared him, and grown men and women quaked in their shoes in terror whenever he turned his attention to them. He wielded power with a brutal viciousness, all in the service of the man he served. He was pitiless. He was remorseless. He was relentless. He did it all to please his master. Then the end came. It was quick. It was brutal. One minute he was in in. The next minute he was a pariah.

Gone were the whispered silences whenever he entered a room; he no longer had rooms to enter. Gone were the furtive glances whenever he passed one by; now even children stare him dead in the eye without fear. Gone was the respectful attention with which people listened to his declamations; now he is lucky if a matatu kange notices he has asked for his thirty-bob change back. Toadies think that they will reign with their masters forever. And while karma doesn't exactly work that way, what goes around, comes around.

What is Judge Maraga playing at?

When Mr. Okiya Omtatah was elected in 2022, his election as declared at several polling stations in Busia County. Several judgments of Kenya's superior courts have ruled that the election results at the polling station are final; the results at the county level declaring, for example, Mr. Omtatah to be elected as the Senator of Busia County, are tallies of the results from the polling stations within the county. If Mr. Omtatah wanted to ensure that he was not cheated of his victory, he would have had an agent to represent his interests in each of the 760 polling stations in Busia County.

Now Mr. Omtatah, and Chief Justice Emeritus David Maraga are eyeing the presidency. Mr. Omtatah is familiar with the cut-and-thrust of an election to the senate, though on a considerably smaller scale to that of a presidential election which in 2022 consisted of around 56,000 polling stations. Judge Maraga is not so lucky.

While he may have a clue as to the scale of a presidential election - after all, as Chief Justice he presided over a presidential election petition at which statistics were bandied about by the parties - he has not yet participated in a cutthroat contest such as the one a presidential election usually is. What little we know of his plans to secure victory in the presidential election does not inspire confidence.

The presidential election consists of the election results at each of the 56,000 polling stations as captured in Forms 34A, the tallies at the county level captured in Forms 34B, and the final tall at the national tallying centre captured in Form 34C. If he is well-prepared (and well-resourced), he will have at least one agent at the 56,000 polling stations, 47 agents at the county tallying centre, and a battery of agents, lawyers, political operatives and supporters at the national tallying centre to ensure that none of his votes is stolen. For this to be true, he needs to have started the onerous job of setting up from scratch a ground game to mobilise supporters who will volunteer time, resources and energy to support his candidature, whether he stands in the election as an independent or as a candidate sponsored by a political party.

Since he has not declared that he is a registered member of a political party yet, we shall assume that he is still mulling where to pitch his tent or he is seriously considering a dark horse campaign as an independent. Either way, he still needs a team to help him organise his campaign.

First, he needs forty-seven county team leaders. They will help him map the 290 and constituencies and identify the current 1,150 elected county assembly representatives, 290 constituency representatives, 47 county woman representatives, 47 senate representatives, 47 county governors and deputy county-governors, 47 speakers of county assemblies, 47 clerks of county assemblies, 47 county secretaries, and the nominated members of the National Assembly, Senate and County Assemblies, together with he political parties that sponsored them to the various legislatures, and the strength or weakness of the incumbents.

He will need all this baseline data to decide whether he should sponsor his own slate of candidates or poach the incumbents from the political affiliations they are members of. The dossiers will be voluminous and tedious to read. But read he must. This is not swotting for the Bar; its way more difficult than that.

Second, he will need to commission several polls to gauge his level of popularity at this point, to gauge the most resonant political questions that he can exploit, to gauge the level of support the incumbents enjoy, to gauge the level of opposition he is likely to face when the campaign is up and running, among a host of many other political issues.

Third, he will need to identify the sources of his campaign finances to pay for the cost of campaigning. County offices. County staff. County volunteers. Cars. Airplane tickets or charters. Airtime. Internet data bundles. Computers. Mobile phones. Meals. Hotel accommodation. Several thousand line items in a complex budget.

Fourth he will need to form a headquarters team of campaign staff. Lawyers (of course). Accountants. Personnel managers. Finance managers. Transport officers. Drivers. Bodyguards. IT technicians. Webpage developers. Telephone operators (or their modern-day equivalent). Mailroom gremlins. Secretaries. Personal assistants. Messengers. Dozens of jobs that have nothing to do with politics have to be staffed up over a matter of months.

Fifth, he needs to fashion a manifesto. The Message he will campaign on. The political brand he will fashion for himself. It is not just vibes and Inshallah. Professional politicians have been doing this for as long as he has been an adult. He is starting the race at the back of the pack and whether he can build a brand that can surpass the current brand in power is all a matter of intuition and storytelling. Judge Maraga is not an intuitive or natural storyteller.

So far, he appears happy to portray himself as a man who has announced that he intends to seek the presidency. He doesn't not appear to be doing much else. While there is a coterie of social media mavens and dingbats who will sing his praises to the moon and back, they do not appear to be a political campaign team of any sort. Time flies when you're in the aluminium siding business, as they say in the United States. If he is not careful, Judge Maraga will blink and find himself locked out of the ballot for want of a real political campaign strategy.

The people shall

This is my view, and no one else's: a constitution is a piece of paper until enough citizens take the necessary steps to respect, protect and uphold the constitution. In Kenya, the mistake that many learned friends have made is to assume that the constitution will only be "implemented" after the state, state officers, state agents and state organs respect, protect and uphold the constitution. They are, respectfully, wrong.

There is a lot that the state can do to celebrate the highest principles of the constitution, but the state will not do any of those things unless the people make it. Kenya's Second Republic was promulgated in 2010 and one very day thereafter, there are many courageous Kenyans who took it upon themselves to live according to the edict in Article 3, Clause (1) of the Constitution of Kenya. One of the seminal moments in this battle was the decisive (after a fashion) defeat of the BBI process that sought to ameliorate the suffering of the political classes while trampling on the wishes and desires of the peoples of this fair land.

I say "ameliorate" because a careful examination of the proposals that received the greatest support of the political classes was the expansion of the unelected offices that politicians would be entitled to after a general election. These unelected positions, ostensibly to ensure that "no part of Kenya is left out of Government" were intended to establish a post-election coalition in all but name between the majority party, the minority party and the unhappy losers in presidential and gubernatorial elections so that they would not foment opposition to the government of the day.

Household economic questions were given short shrift; the cost of living is the highest it has ever been, never mind the posh-sounding pablums by the Council of Economic Advisors. Mr. Miguna Miguna's proposal to slash the take-home salaries of elected state officers did not even receive the courtesy of a response. The proposal by Mr. Ekuru Aukot to create a more equitable parliament, fifty/fifty between men and women and fewer in number (aka Punguza Mizigo Bill), was rejected out of hand. Mr. Okiya Omtatah's campaign to audit the public debt has been opposed at every turn by successive governments. In short, the people's needs were not on the table; the needs of fat-cat politicians, used to the truffles of the state, took centre stage.

It is only when enough citizens impose their will on the state that the constitution will be implemented in full. It will not be implemented only if the only thing you have in your hand is a court order. Take the BBI fiasco as a guide: while it was defeated in the law courts, the current parliament has taken upon itself to revive the process on its own motion, with a few parliament-specific goals in tow. This time round, despite several judgments of the superior court, parliament is plowing full-steam ahead with parliamentarians' desire to "entrench CDF in the constitution". Mealy-mouthed explanations about the "benefits of CDF" fly in the express findings of the superior courts: Kenya does not need wasteful public funds purporting to implement programmes of national and county governments.

It has been twelve months since the government faced the brunt of the anger of young Kenyans and the president "withdrew" the Finance Bill 2024 after it had been enacted by parliament. What Kenyans did on that terrible day last year was to espouse the highest principles of the constitution to respect, protect and uphold the constitution. They were back on the streets of many cities and towns of Kenya on the one year anniversary. Their resolve does not appear to have waned despite a year of propaganda and search engine optimisation by propagandists of the state. Constitutions are not self-executing instruments; they require the blood, sweat and toil of the people to make any kind of sense. Kenyans demonstrate this truism with a resolve that should terrify the men and women who have chosen to suborn and pervert the constitutional order.

Judge Maraga's other choice

Chief Justice Maraga (Emeritus) gave an interview on the 18th June, 2025, where he announced that he intended to stand in the net presidential election. The interview covered a broad range of current political questions, and the announcement was treated with little enthusiasm by the interviewer, Mr. Joe Ageyo. It is a sign of the seriousness, or lack thereof, that Judge Maraga's presidential ambitions is treated.

A very, very small straw poll among my online horde (which is not dispositive of anything) supports the idea that Judge Maraga is in the wrong campaign. He beat out a relatively strong field to be appointed as Kenya's second Chief Justice under the 2010 Constitution. As head of the Judiciary, he tried his best to advance the administration of justice by expanding the real estate development of the Judiciary and keeping out of political contests. That is until his Supreme Court nullified the 2017 presidential election which he followed up by calling for the dissolution of Parliament for failing to meet the Tw-thirds Gender Rule. Anyway, I digress.

Judge Maraga was a good judge and a good Chief Justice, never mind what the likes of Senior Counsel Ahmednasir Abdullahi say about him. During the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic, he ensured that the courts continued to function efficiently and even after Uhuru Kenyatta and his henchmen "revisited" the Judiciary by slashing the Judiciary budget so viciously it is a wonder it continued to function in the dying days of Uhuru's presidency. Even his leadership of the Judicial Service Commission did not elicit the kind of carping that accompanies those sorts of high offices. Nevertheless, I am slowly succumbing to the argument that despite his many qualities and qualifications, he is not well-suited to be elected Kenya's sixth president.

Lawyers, especially Kenyan lawyers who have had long legal careers like Judge Maraga, generally, make for bad politicians. A perusal of the parliamentary Hansard on the performance of lawyers in both the National Assembly and Senate reveal that they are champion debaters, but they are too easily enamoured of legalism to make proper political choices that will benefit not just their constituents but the Republic as well. If you look at the decision by the lawyers sitting in the National Assembly to defy the Supreme Court regarding the Constituencies Development Fund, you will see what I am talking about. These people, in my estimation, should not be trusted to hold elected office, certainly not the presidency.

In Judge Maraga's case, if he truly wishes to serve, there is one place where his particular strength of character will be of immense value: the State Law Office. Kenya is ripe for an Attorney-General who is not afraid to do the right thing, liwe liwalo, and Judge Maraga has demonstrated the ability to cut through the political faff and present the legal case over matters of national importance. Of course he will need to brush up on his political and interpersonal skills, but what he currently possesses is well-suited to being Mwanasheria Mkuu and Mkuu wa Sheria all rolled into one.

This is true of the other lawyers cosplaying at politics. Their particular skills are well suited to sitting on the Bench or representing the State at the State Law Office or the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Indeed, if we are to amend the current statutory framework, I would recommend amending all the laws that provide that the chairman of a constitutional commission should have the qualifications of a judge. If you are not appointing a Judge or magistrate, that qualification only serves to entrench lawyering into administrative frameworks for which lawyering is a liability, not an asset. And yes, that includes the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, Commission on Administrative Justice, National gender and Equality Commission and Judicial Service Commission (which should never, ever have been headed by the CJ to begin with).

If Judge Maraga wishes to serve the people of Kenya once more in a consequential way, he should eschew the presidency and instead hitch his wagon to a presidential candidate who has the necessary probity he wishes to bring to the table and serve in that government as the principal legal advisor to the Government. In that position, he would have the opportunity to sweep away the legacies of odious monsters like Charles Njonjo and instead, revivify among the State Counsels a sense of duty and honour that seems to be waning these days.

Will the real Judge Maraga please stand up

Some of the men (and women) whom we think are incorrigibly stupid only appear to be so because of the facade they put on. Anyone who can persuade a constituency to re-elect him, election after election, can hardly be described as stupid, even as he (or she) does a whole bunch of things that make no damn sense. What we must ask is this: how come so many bad men (and women) keep getting elected while the paragons of virtue who we have placed on pedestals keep falling by the electoral wayside?

The answer, I believe, lies in the ability of the so-called bad candidates to organise politics organisations dedicated to their election/re-election and the inability of their novice would-be challengers to do the same. There is the much larger population of such truly unpleasant men (and women) who will never get elected, even if they did the hard work of establishing political machines in support of their electoral ambitions.

It is damnedly difficult to set up an election ground game in Kenya at the best of times. It is twice as difficult if you want to set one up without an existing (and successful) political party to offer any form support. While Kenya has a massive number of registered political parties, few of them have successfully sent a candidate to Parliament or a county assembly, and those that fail to build up on electoral successes tend to flat out at the next general election. Be that as it may, a well-organised and well-run political party is essential to electoral success.

I say all this to speculate at the chances of Chief Justice emeritus David Maraga. Judge Maraga appears to have cast his die in presidential electoral politics and is traversing the country and appearing at political events to sell himself as a candidate at tech next general election. Those who support his campaign point to his integrity (which is considerably high). So far, he has not given any reason to consider that he is not fit to be president of this republic. Except one.

He does not appear to be a member of a political party and no political party appears to have hitched its wagons to his prospective candidacy. While he appears to be surrounded by a team of committed supporters, that is all it seems: in the absence of a political structure of any sort, I am let to wonder whether the men and women singing his praises wherever he goes, who shout the loudest about his credentials, and who bristle at any doubt against their candidate, are the parasites that afflict all political candidates and suck out the lifeblood of a political campaign.

Judge Maraga, at this stage in the proceedings, should have completed the arduous task of establishing and registering a political party (especially if he was never joining an existing political outfit). He should have began to identify candidates for the 1,350 elected county assembly seats, a slate of special interest seat nominees (women, youth, PWDs), candidates for the 290 elected national assembly seats, 47 woman representative seats, 47 elected senate seats, and the slates of special interest seats in both chambers of Parliament. And collectively, they should have started recruitment of members of their political party and, crucially, fundraising from these members to sustain their campaign. He does not appear to have done any of these things. How does he expect to be elected?

"Integrity" is not a political philosophy or ideology. What, beyond, "anti-corruption", is his politics made up of? How much of the public purse is he going to dedicate to the brick-and-mortar "development" or roads and affordable houses and how much of it is going to dedicate to paying a real wage to the perennially neglected healthcare workers and basic education teachers? Will he expand the size of the presidential fleet with diesel-guzzling armoured SUVs and German limousines or will he, finally, abolish VIP transport for the entire national and county executive and, instead, invest that wasteful expenditure in public safety? These, and dozens upon dozens of ideological questions remain unanswered and undermine his presidential campaign before it has even official began.

If Judge Maraga wants to be President and Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces, he cannot afford to confine his political campaign to visiting courtrooms where "activists" are being prosecuted or "GenZ" rallies where the most important feature of the rallies is his presence. If he doesn't build a political movement, consisting of a political party, electoral candidates, a political ideology, and a campaign finance fund-raising team, he will be remembered (if at all) for being just one more dilettante who showed so much promise and flamed out so pitiably.

Time's up, boomer

Kenya’s leadership is overwhelmingly grey and male. Captains of industry, ministers of religion, government bureaucrats, elected politicians and, yes, trades union leaders, are more likely to have seen more decades on Earth than the average Kenyan. Many die while still in their harnesses, having clung on to their positions of power and authority long beyond it made any sense for them to be there in the first place. Many cling on because they fear the obscurity that comes with being “retired”.

Some, though a precious few, maintain a quick mind, possess and share a wealth of wisdom, and offer leadership when the impatience of youth rears its head and threatens the established order of things. The vast majority of the geriatrics who won’t let go keep to themselves. But a small minority simply can’t let go and won’t shut up about what they have done for us. They are a pestilential plague upon the land.

In recent days, one of those old men has taken it upon himself to justify his continued presence atop one of Kenya's most important institutions, an institution that was established to champion the rights of unionised labour. He knee-jerk response to the demand by a youthful rights activist to step aside and allow fresh blood at the helm of the institution is par for the course for old men who believe, almost always erroneously, that they are indispensable.

In an inexplicable screed that was published in one of Kenya's leading tabloids, he set down in excruciating detail what he had done to bring Kenyan labour closer to employers and closer to the government in a tripartite agreement that he is absulotely certain has been a boon to Kenyan employees. (Why the tabloid chose to publish this remarkable waste of column inches only the misguided editors of that rag can explain.) He followed up with a spectacularly insanely long tweet trying to paint the object of his animus as an untrustworthy conwoman who stole millions of shillings entrusted to her for the care, treatment and support of victims of police violence during the anti-Finance-Bill-2024 protests.

It was completely lost on him that everything he had written down in response to what he had been accused of - overstaying in leadership beyond all reason - did not once address that core question. In his mind, because he "oversaw" the enactment of five landmark labour laws, and "contributed" to the promulgation of Article 41 (found in the Bill of Rights) of the Constitution on labour relations, there was no reason to respond to the fact that he had overstayed in leadership and that it was high time he stood aside and allowed younger persons to step into the breech.

This sort of intellectual intransigence is all too common in all manner of institutions. But change is coming, whether the old men accept it or not. Voters have begun the arduous task of weeding out the geriatrics from Parliament and the drip-drip-drip of electoral replacements will become a flood soon enough. C-suites in corporate Kenya are seeing wazee being put out to pasture; more and more CEOs are men and, increasingly, women in their forties and fifties, rather than cranky grey-hairs in their seventies. Ministries of religion have many Gen Z preachers, though much of their religious ministry causes great spiritual discomfort even among their youthful flocks.

This old man's time is up. Only he seems to think that it is not.